My "Rosebud"?

Being in a reflective mood, after returning from my most recent last trip, I searched online for three books that I was infatuated with while growing-up. Interesting enough they are all still in print. The internet is such a wonderful tool for procrastinating.

 The first book, "My Side of the Mountain", is a story about a young nature-loving boy who runs away from his home in the city to the Catskill Mountains to live off the land. His moutain home was a hollowed-out tree and his hunting partner a young peregrine falcon. My uninhibited youthful imagination was engulfed by this story, when my fourth grade teacher read this book outloud to the class. I wanted to be that kid. I wanted to run away from home and live off the land. The book precipitated endless hours of playing in the woods, making wigwam frames and animal snares, exploring nature, wading through streams, catching tadpole and minnows, identifying plant and animal tracks, and countless overnight camping trips. I’ve thought about this book many times since fourth grade. It spoke to my sense of adventure.


 Another book that I became obsessed in my youth, or rather book series of books, was the "Foxfire" Book Series. The series documented the lore of the Smokey Mountain sand Appalachian culture. I spent hours reading and fantasizing about homesteading, building log cabins, snake lore, faith healing, moonshine, basket weaving, quilting, ghost stories, wild plants, and so on. Most of the lessons to be learned from these books are transcribed from monologues and stories told by old-timers to preserved their methods and living style for future generations. When I was introduced to the books years ago, they continued to fuel my nascent, youthful desire to my live off the land. While exploring in the woods, I started searching for edible plants, roots, nuts and berries (e.g. sassafras root, violets, acorns, hickory nut, walnuts, raspberries, black berries, etc.).


 A third book that gripped my imagination was "One Acre & Security: How to Live off the Land without Ruining It", a forerunner in the back-to-earth movement. After skimming the book’s pages, my scheming and plotting shifted from the woods to living self-sufficiently off a hypothetical acre of land. The book provided the “how to” details to plant and maintain a vegetable garden and fruit trees, and raise small scale livestock. Instead of living in hollowed-out tree in the woods, I was going to be a homesteader. Not much more realistic, it wasn’t all fiction, either. I started gardening, canning and freezing the produce. My small scale livestock enterprise eventually comprised of a hundred chickens, a steer and a couple of piglets. To complete the "daydream", I learned how to bake bread from scratch.

The naive magic of my childhood.